Overwatch Players Still Playing Average 2 Hours Daily

Overwatch has become one of the most popular sensations in the gaming industry and its showing no sign of slowing down.

Blizzard recently announced that their active playerbase has crossed the 35 million mark, and now we know that the players are fairly dedicated too.

Activision Blizzard bigwig Tim Kilpin spoke with MCVUK.com, and while the interview covered the whole breadth of the joint company’s library, some interesting statistics were shared about Overwatch specifically.

The average Overwatch player spends at least 2 hours in Blizzard’s vision of the future, popping ults and not spending time on the payload.

Naturally, some players only have time to log on during the weekends, while highly dedicated fans spend many more hours playing daily. This number seems to be accurate for the majority, and compared to other AAA titles, it’s a damn good rate.

Kilpin cited the constant stream of free updates as one of the reasons, and we’re inclined to agree.

While popularity and quality are what matter most in keeping your players hooked, with the ridiculously oversaturated contemporary entertainment industry, companies are vying for the time and attention of their audiences, and novelty has become one of the main factors.

While Blizzard prefers focusing on quality over quantity while other multiplayer games add tiny bits of content every week, the stream of new maps and heroes has been steady since launch.

Changing the scenery with new maps definitely goes a long way to keep players coming back for more, as well as wooing those who may have drifted away to return, however the new heroes are where the biggest draw lies.

Due to the extremely different playstyles of the heroes, Overwatch often feels more like a MOBA than an FPS. Typically, FPS games give you a choice of different guns. They may look different, have different stats and vary in efficacy, but they are still hunks of metal that accelerate smaller hunks of metal in the general direction of things you don’t like.

The vast array of ability types the heroes of Overwatch boast (beyond their own assortment of hunks of metal that accele… you know the drill) almost make it feel like you’re playing a whole new game with each and every one of them.

Playing as Reinhardt will be wholly different from playing as Reaper, which will again be wholly different from playing as Mercy, and so on.

Just recently Blizzard added a new hybrid damage dealer/healer to the game, the Talon geneticist Moira.

Moira is generally considered tough to master due to her atypical resource management, and all of her abilities have two versions which heal allies or hurt enemies depending on what you want to achieve. Before her, we got Doomfist, who is practically a 2D fighting game character transplanted into a first-person shooter, combos and all.

With each new hero being an entirely new and unique experience, players are bound to keep coming back to check out what’s with the freshest content.

Peppering new maps and a dizzying amount of balance patches in between heroes, augmented by thematic events like Halloween Terror, ensures that there is always something new in the game. And by the time it loses the new-car-smell, something else is already around the corner.

The key, here, is that all of this DLC is free. The community isn’t divided between those who pay and those who don’t, a mistake many big-name AAA multiplayer games make. If you’ve bought the game, you can play all the heroes and maps as any other player can.

Overwatch continues to capture the imaginations of fans, streamers and cosplayers worldwide, and the game is seen in news headlines almost every other day, so this stint in the gaming industry’s spotlight is no fleeting matter.

Blizzard’s top team-based multiplayer shooter is destined to sit on the peak for a while longer.

Overwatch Players Still Playing Average 2 Hours Daily was last modified: November 27th, 2017 by Duncan Maxwell

The game doesn’t provide much depth to hold me for longer… Who am I kidding, I haven’t played it since Halloween. I seem to enjoy Heroes of The Storm much more – the progression system is more interesting, the objectives are varied for each map and Traits make replaying the same characters each match much more interesting too.

Overwatch is a good game, but it is simply not deep enough for me. I feel bad for buying it… A cautionary tale of hype…

mdotk

How long did you play it for?

Limit Break

I’ll have to intall the game again to answer this… Because unlike Steam Blizzard’s app doesn’t just outright show it to you… Wait for an update in a hour…

Limit Break

353 hours overall.

mdotk

wow, thanks for taking the time to reinstall! 353 is a good amount of time – surely you can’t feel too bad for buying it?

Limit Break

Seeing how twitchy it plays now… No, I really do feel bad. I am not enjoying myself anymore playing it. I am not even trying to enter the tournament part of it or whatever it is called… So twitchy…
I had much better time playing Titanfall 2. In that game it doesn’t matter if you lose as a team or win because winning or losing doesn’t mean too much – it is how good you personaly were during the match and get rewarded accordingly with progression for weapons, skills and so on and so forth.
In Overwatch all your effort is absolutely nullified if your team doesn’t work as a team, which effectively makes you the hostage of your team. You get only XP which is almost always a static number depending on losses (2300 XP or something) to winning (4000 or something ? I don’t remember anymore).
So yes, I am very disappointed in Overwatch. And don’t think I played so much because I like it so much, no… If to be frank I have no idea how so many hours came up, all I know I am not enjoying it in the slightest anymore, and also I share the account with my little brother who I am not sure is playing it anymore… So yeah, waste of money…

mdotk

Some great points, will check out Titanfall 2, thanks.

Limit Break

That is the least I can do. Have fun. The game is way too good to have anything to do with EA.

KHele2k

I’d love to see a graph of the average number of hours each rank plays per day. Average is supposedly gold based on a chart Jeff Kaplan posted a month or so ago. I remember Master was top 10 percent, GM was top 3% and Top 500 was <1%, but I can't remember the rest. It's pretty mind-boggling though to think about how many other things people could be good at if they put in the same number of hours in anything else.